Guantanamo Migrant Operations Center
The Guantanamo Migrant Operations Center is a migrant detention facility at Guantanamo Bay detention camp within Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, on the coast of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The GMOC is a distinct facility from the detention blocks used to hold terrorism suspects and "illegal enemy combatants". In the past, the GMOC has usually held a small number of Haitian and Cuban migrants who were detained at sea but sometimes held larger numbers when those countries were in political turmoil, like during the Haitian refugee crisis or the 1994 Cuban rafter crisis. The detention of migrants at the GMOC has been previously criticized by human rights groups and been the subject of lawsuits.
The GMOC was the focus of an initiative announced on January 29, 2025, under President Trump to greatly expand the facility so it could hold 30,000 of the "worst of the worst" migrants, with some being held indefinitely. The expansion of the facility has been questioned on legal, logistical, and humanitarian grounds. While Trump's presidential memorandum specified that migrants would be held at the GMOC, some migrants have been brought to Guantanamo and held by military guards at Camp 6, a military prison previously used to hold Al-Qaeda suspects.
Since the announcement of the expansion of the GMOC, various small groups detainees have been flown on and off the facility. In February 2025, 178 Venezuelan migrants were moved to Guantanamo Bay, with 127 being held at Camp 6 while the remaining 51 were held at GMOC. All but one of these migrants were reportedly deported back to Venezuela via Honduras, with the remaining migrant moved to another detention facility by February 20, 2025. As of March 14, 2025, all detained migrants had been moved off the base. Later more detainees including Nicaraguans had been shuttled to the base. The estimates were by the end of March that less than 400 detainees had been sent to the base at any time. The estimated costs of implementing Trump's executive order to expand the GMOC has been $40 million in the first month of operations.
History
The GMOC has been used to hold migrants detained at sea for decades, including Haitian and Cuban refugees. While the facility has generally only been used to hold a small number of migrants, it has been expanded in the past in reaction to increased numbers of migrants being detained at sea.Early history
Because of its unique location, in the 1970s while many Haitians attempting to flee Haiti would sail directly to the United States, others would sail to Guantanamo. According to legal scholar Jeffrey S. Kahn:For many of the Haitian captains, the coast of Cuba served as the key navigational reference they would use to guide them on their way to Miami. Following this route meant Haitians had to traverse the notoriously tumultuous waters of the Windward Passage—the "channel of wind" in Haitian Kreyòl—between Cuba and Haiti, a crossing which often left vessels damaged and in need of repairs. While the town of Maisí on Cuba's eastern tip commonly served this purpose nicely, some captains ended up further west in the protective waters of Guantanamo Bay.
In the 1970s, several ships carrying a large amount of Haitians landed at Guantanamo forcing the US military to handle the migrants and thus, the US military base at Guantanamo became a de facto area for processing migrants attempting to come to United States. After processing migrants through Guantanamo, the US government observed that the processing of migrants at the base provided much less oversight from the legal system and was done in a quicker proceedings in comparison to processing Haitian migrants on the US mainland. As a result as early as 1978, the US Immigration and Naturalization Service had discussed plans regarding "the feasibility of having the Coast Guard transport Haitians to Guantanamo Bay." As Kahn writes: "In other words, rather than wait for Haitian asylum seekers to sail up to the base's piers, higher-ups at INS had begun to consider the possibility of just bringing Haitians directly to Guantanamo. Although the reasoning behind this proposal is not stated explicitly, it is patently obvious: it was easier to get rid of Haitians at the base. With that, the seeds of a more formal version of ad hoc asylum processing at Guantanamo were planted."
During the Reagan administration, detention and processing of migrants at Guantanamo went down with the creation in 1980 of the Haitian Migrant Interdiction Operations, which is now known as the as Alien Migrant Interdiction Operations. This program used the Coast Guard to essential intercept migrant ships at sea and process them on the ship's deck for either return to their country or for potential asylum claims. As a result of these programs, the use of Guantanamo as a major staging place for migrant processing would not occur again until the 1990s.
Haitian crises and GMOC
While normally the GMOC only detains a small number of migrants, there was a large influx of migrants from Haiti after Jean-Bertrand Aristide was overthrown in the 1991 Haitian coup d'état. In response to human rights violations by the Haitian military, approximately 40,000 Haitians fled the country. Under the law, if the US government encountered any fleeing Haitians at sea and those Haitian had a "credible fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion", then those Haitians could be taken to GMOC and processed for asylum claims. At the time, there was a large HIV positive population in Haiti and those asylees who tested positive for HIV were housed at a separate facility at Guantanamo Bay, Camp Bulkeley. As a result at one point in the 1990s the facility held "thousands of Haitian migrants inside the Guantanamo base, including in a notorious camp for those diagnosed with HIV, who were banned from entering the U.S. at the time."Judge Sterling Johnson, Jr., of the US District Court reviewing the conditions at the HIV detention camp that held roughly "200 HIV-positive Haitian refugees" described it as follows:
They live in camps surrounded by razor barbed wire. They tie plastic garbage bags to the sides of the building to keep the rain out. They sleep on cots and hang sheets to create some semblance of privacy. They are guarded by the military and are not permitted to leave the camp, except under military escort. The Haitian detainees have been subjected to pre-dawn military sweeps as they sleep by as many as 400 soldiers dressed in full riot gear. They are confined like prisoners and are subject to detention in the brig without hearing for camp rule infractions.
After reviewing the rights of the detainees, Johnson ordered the United States to shut down its HIV detention center "because of ongoing constitutional, statutory, and regulatory violations of the detainees' rights" and release its 143 HIV-positive adults, two HIV-negative adults, and 13 untested children. Johnson found that some of the migrants had been "detained for almost 2 years, with no indication of when, if ever, they would be released." The court stated:
"he detained Haitians are neither criminals nor national security risks. Some are pregnant women and others are children. Simply put, they are merely the unfortunate victims of a fatal disease. Where detention no longer serves a legitimate purpose, the detainees must be released. The Haitian camp at Guantanamo is the only known refugee camp in the world composed entirely of HIV+ refugees. The Haitians' plight is a tragedy of immense proportion and their continued detainment is totally unacceptable to this Court."
The HIV detention camp closed on July 18, 1993.
Cuban Crises
After Bill Clinton reversed a nearly 30-year-old policy of immediate amnesty for Cubans arriving to the US, Cubans began to be sent to the GMOC. During this time both Cubans and Haitians were coming to Guantanamo detention facilities. In an effort to decrease the size of the camp, the US tried to convince other countries in the Caribbean or Latin America to accept either Haitian or Cuban refugees. Up to 21,000 Haitians were held in Guantanamo at one time during this wave of the Haitian refugee camp. More than 30,000 Cubans were detained at once at Guantanamo. The main problem for the camp in sustaining so many people was primarily infrastructure such as water, electricity, and sewage, not space. Roughly 10,000 Haitians agreed to return home after President Aristide was returned to power in October 1994. However, 6,000 were forcibly repatriated against their wishes. By December 1994, 5,000 Haitian refugees were still at the camp. The UNHCR voiced disapproval of the US policy of forced repatriation of Haitians and suggested it was outside international refugee law in early 1995.GMOC from 2000 to 2025
After the turmoil of the 1990s, the United States moved to a different system for processing migrants detained at sea. According to Jeffrey S. Kahn, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis, this system operates as follows: "if the Coast Guard stops a vessel and those aboard end up passing a 'credible fear' interview, they are taken to Guantanamo for an additional interview to determine if they have a 'well-founded fear of persecution,'... they pass that second screening, the State Department works to resettle them in third countries, like France or Australia. The deliberate aim is to destroy any perception that getting to Guantanamo is a way to get to the United States. To use the jargon of the State Department, the aim is to avoid 'magnetizing' the base."After the large increase of migrant detentions during certain political crises in the 1990s, the GMOC greatly contracted to a small detention facility. Prior to the Trump administration's announcement in 2025, the GMOC migrant center had a reported total capacity of around 130 with it usually only holding a small number of migrants in the double digits. During this time, " relatively small number of migrants are housed in barrack-like facilities while they undergo interviews with asylum officers" and "sylum-seekers who passed those initial interviews have been referred for resettlement in third countries like Australia and Canada." The US has sought to avoid allowing those caught at sea to obtain asylum within the US to deter that effort.
The housing of migrants at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp had been criticized by human rights groups prior to changes in 2025. The International Refugee Assistance Project said that those who were detained there "described unsanitary conditions, families with young children housed together with single adults, a lack of access to confidential phone calls, and the absence of educational services for children." The American Civil Liberties Union had filed for information about the detention of migrants at the GMOC but the Biden administration had stated that it "is not a detention facility and none of the migrants there are detained". According to the IRAP, "efugees were regularly confined to their rooms for weeks at a time, and denied confidential phone calls, even with their lawyers."
In 2022, it was reported that the Biden administration was considering holding a potential surge of Haitians migrants at Guantanamo. When the Biden administration was asked about using the GMOC to hold migrants that were detained at the southern Border Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas stated: "Guantanamo was a place that historically has been used to return individuals who are interdicted at sea. That is not applicable to the individuals whom we are encountering along the southern border. That is just misinformation."